“We had to stand in freezing water while cutting away at the huge mass of flesh which encased the bones.” ] Captain Josh, as he was known to all the country near and far, was a genial old man, radiating good nature—a typical whaler of the old school. Although seventy-six years had whitened his hair, when the cry of “Ah! Blow-o-o-o!” had sounded through the village, he forgot his age and was in the first boat to leave the beach on the five-mile chase. And it was his arm, still strong under the weight of years, which sent the keen-edged lance at the first thrust straight into the lungs of the whale. Mr. James L. Clark, formerly of the Museum, and myself, as soon as word of the whale was received, hastened to Amagansett, where we had two weeks of the hardest sort of work to secure the skeleton. The carcass was beached just at the edge of low tide, where surf was continually breaking over it, and we had to stand in freezing water while cutting away at the huge mass of flesh which encased the bones. The temperature was +12°, and, to add to our difficulties, on the second day a terrific storm almost buried the carcass in sand so that it was necessary to build a breakwater of flesh against the surf, and laboriously dig out the skeleton bone by bone. The Amagansett whale was an old female, fifty-four feet long, and proved to be the largest specimen which had then been recorded. On the same day that it was captured, a smaller thirty-eight-foot whale, evidently the calf of the first, was killed at Wainscott, Long Island. This skeleton was also secured, and was eventually sent to London, while the Amagansett whale with its baleen remains in the Museum to be mounted in the Hall of Water Mammals. Just a year later another right whale, a twenty-eight-foot calf, was killed at Amagansett, but its carcass was lost in a storm. [Illustration: The baleen of a right whale. This specimen had whalebone eight feet long. ] As yet it is impossible to say with authority just how many species of right whales exist. Some years ago Lieutenant Maury, after studying the daily logs of hundreds of whaling vessels, prepared a chart which appears to show that the animals do not cross the belt of tropical water at the Equator, and that the right whales of the northern and southern hemispheres are thus definitely separated. Acting upon the supposition that since there could be no communication between them these whales must certainly have become differentiated enough to form distinct species, each has been given a scientific name. In the light of present knowledge, however, this apparent separation cannot be considered sufficient ground for dividing the right whales into northern and southern species, unless a critical comparison of their external and internal anatomy reveals constant differences. CHAPTER XXII THE BOTTLENOSE WHALE AND HOW IT IS HUNTED